Mobile Accessibility practices for Government Of India Applications

Few months earlier, a set of like minded accessibility enthusiasts under the co-ordination of Dr Nirmita Narasimhan of Center for Internet and Society came together to formulate mobile accessibility practices to share with the Government of India. Government of India and various state governments are using mobile applications as a channel to communicate, provide services and get feedback on governance. We have found that these fruits are not reaching to more than 150 million Indians with disabilities. So, we want to educate the departments and teams developing these mobile applications on the importance of mobile application accessibility and ensure that they have right technical knowledge in making them accessible.

Presently there is no single uniform international standard on the accessibility of mobile apps. The W3C is working on a standard, which will take time to be published. In the meantime it has published some best practices, primarily based upon the WCAG 2.0. There are also guidelines available from Google , Apple and BBC. However, none of these are comprehensive and cannot be adopted as is. Experts from various organizations with their experience and a study conducted by CIS to understand the challenges encountered by people with disabilities in using the government apps are compiled together to formulate these mobile accessibility practices.

Though the primary intention of these mobile accessibility practices are for the government, these can be adapted and used as reference for any mobile application developer / designer.

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Published by Maxability

Rakesh Paladugula is a dedicated accessibility enthusiast with wide experience on all forms of digital accessibility. He is a trainer, mentor, advisor, advocate and evangelist. He believes in the modern socio-scientific world digital accessibility is a fundamental right of every citizen including those who have disabilities, low literacy and are from economically backward.
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